The Tractor at the Church Door

Susan Larsen tapped her water glass with a fork, and forty people in the basement of St. John’s Lutheran turned to look at her. She was smiling. She had a nice smile, and she used it on me.

“Before we let Pastor Dahl go home to bed,” she said, “I just have one little surprise. I hope nobody minds. I’ve booked a car for the getaway tomorrow.”

There was a small murmur down the tables. The church ladies had set out ham buns, potato salad, a crock of baked beans, and Joan’s scotcheroos on the back table under a dish towel. Somebody had already been into them.

“It’s a white 1950s Chevrolet,” Susan said. “With a driver. He’ll pull right up to the steps after the ceremony, and the photographer can get them in the back seat with the doors open. It’s my gift. Nine hundred dollars, and worth every penny.”

People clapped, the polite kind of clapping you do in a church basement when somebody gives a gift. I clapped too. I didn’t know yet what was coming, though I should have.

“I know Wayne had his tractor idea,” she went on, and she turned that smile on me again. “And it’s very sweet. It really is. But it’s a little redneck for the photos, don’t you think? These are pictures they’ll have for fifty years.”

A few people laughed. Not many. Mostly Ben’s side of the room, the Minneapolis cousins, and I don’t hold it against them.

They didn’t know. To them it was a funny line about a farmer and his tractor.

I looked at my daughter. Katie was sitting next to Ben at the head table, which was two folding tables pushed together with a white paper cloth.

She was looking down at her plate. She had a fork in her hand and she wasn’t using it.

Ben was looking at his plate too. Ben is a good young man, an engineer with a firm in Minneapolis, and I liked him from the first weekend she brought him home. But he didn’t say anything, and neither did she.

Joan’s hand found my knee under the table and stayed there. That’s what Joan does.

Thirty-nine years married, and she has never once had to tell me in words to keep my mouth shut. She just puts her hand on my knee.

So I didn’t say anything either. I smiled back at Susan, and I nodded like a man who had just been told the weather, and I ate the rest of my ham bun. It tasted like cardboard, but I ate it.